Replies

I agree with your basic premise that no punishment should be meted out to Santorum in any form, since he did what he thought was right and politically expedient then. But it certainly didn't help the pro-life cause. Think then, even if Toomey won the primary and lost the general elections, Kyl would be the new judiciary chairman and we would still possess a 54 seat majority. That being said, h still desreves re-election.

I agree with your basic premise that no punishment should be meted out to Santorum in any form, since he did what he thought was right and politically expedient then. But it certainly didn't help the pro-life cause. Think then, even if Toomey won the primary and lost the general elections, Kyl would be the new judiciary chairman and we would still possess a 54 seat majority. That being said, h still desreves re-election. I think you are missing the key point of my arguement. My arguement was twofold: 1. Specter, while personally bad on abortion, is pretty good on judges, which for all practical purposes are the law on abortion right now. He gets flack for Bork, who, in my opinion, is a little weird (although I would have voted for anyway, but still), but he backed Thomas, and has backed 100% of Bush's appointments. He also won his election with 0 help and 0 money from the national party. 2. Meanwhile, we DUMPED money into other very close Senate races, the ones I listed, and with the exception of Lisa Murkowski, whom is moderate on the issue while her opponent was a standard pro-abortion guy, all were pro-life. It seems reasonable to think that even had Toomey WON, he well could have lost, say, the Florida Senate race, or South Dakota, because he would have drained money and energy from them. And both of which are far bigger victories, for the pro-life cause as well as for the party it seems to me, then getting rid of Specter. It seems to me, that at the end of the day, it was very possible, even likely, that we would have wound up with 53 Senators, and lost 2 seats we now hold, both of which vote our way on judges. I think that keeping Specter, who votes with us on judges, and devoting our money to other, more important races, helped the party and the pro-life cause.

(!*#*), Sorry, for reasons I can't figure out, my computer can't decide if I need to put in HTML for page breaks on FR or if it will do it automatically.

Here's what I was trying to say:

I agree with your basic premise that no punishment should be meted out to Santorum in any form, since he did what he thought was right and politically expedient then. But it certainly didn't help the pro-life cause. Think then, even if Toomey won the primary and lost the general elections, Kyl would be the new judiciary chairman and we would still possess a 54 seat majority. That being said, h still desreves re-election.

I think you are missing the key point of my argument. My argument was twofold:

1. Specter, while personally bad on abortion, is pretty good on judges, which for all practical purposes are the law on abortion right now. He gets flack for Bork, who, in my opinion, is a little weird (although I would have voted for anyway, but still), but he backed Thomas, and has backed 100% of Bush's appointments. He also won his election with 0 help and 0 money from the national party.

2. Meanwhile, we DUMPED money into other very close Senate races, the ones I listed, and with the exception of Lisa Murkowski, whom is moderate on the issue while her opponent was a standard pro-abortion guy, all were pro-life. It seems reasonable to think that even had Toomey WON, he well could have lost, say, the Florida Senate race, or South Dakota, because he would have drained money and energy from them. And both of which are far bigger victories, for the pro-life cause as well as for the party it seems to me, then getting rid of Specter. It seems to me, that at the end of the day, it was very possible, even likely, that we would have wound up with 53 Senators, and lost 2 seats we now hold, both of which vote our way on judges. I think that keeping Specter, who votes with us on judges, and devoting our money to other, more important races, helped the party and the pro-life cause.